Last week, Corban Brook wrote up a tutorial walking through Ruby's metaprogramming toolbox. He covers method_missing, module_eval, and many others. There is a lot of power hidden in these methods and techniques, it's certainly worth a good look.

There are a lot of authentication options out there for your new (or existing!) Rails application. Do you really know about them all? Charles Max Wood wrote up an article listing 9 different options for solving your next authentication problem.

Micah Martin has commenced his latest Ruby tournament, following up to the previous Ruby Battleship Tournament. This time around, you're challenged with creating an AI to play and win at hangman. His site provides you with a jump start guide to get you off the ground and submissions will be graded not only on completion time, but more importantly, on code quality. The Ruby Hangman Tournament runs until the end of September.

James Pozdena forked the Pony project and came up with a way to allow you to send email via GMail. This is certainly for those projects where ActionMailer doesn't apply - like a small Sinatra application, for example - and is worth a look if you're running into GMail issues.

While I may have been quiet on the official Rails blog in the last couple of weeks, there is still a lot going on. We briefly cover several recent changes to Edge Rails which will likely affect your next project.

Remember, Ruby5 will be released Tuesday and Friday mornings, due to your feedback for consistent, morning releases. To stay informed about and active with this podcast, we encourage you to do one of the following:

Previous Episodes

Blue Ridge, FunFX and Cucumber, and unit testing your file system interactions round out today's episode - which is obviously a little test-heavy. We also talk about obeying robots.txt, Snow Leopard, and more.

Ruby Version Manager, Crondonkulous, and flag_shih_tzu are just a few of the topics covered by this Friday morning episode of Ruby5. Since the majority of listeners preferred morning releases, we're going to try out releasing new episodes on Tuesday and Friday mornings.

In this episode we talk about gems, gem hosting, learning regular expressions, and Yehuda's five favorite things in Rails 3. Don't forget to subscribe to the podcast and if you've got any news, let us know at ruby5@envylabs.com.